Mass Gathering Medicine Summit – February 9 & 10 2018

The annual Mass Gathering Medicine Summit will be in Miami, Florida in 2018!

An impressive start to the North American conversation on Mass Gatherings last week in New York City at the Mass Gathering Summit…

Co-chaired by MGMIG’s Dr. Adam Lund and Dr. Matt Friedman, it was a room packed with some incredible knowledge and experiences in a variety of planning and clinical roles.

Photos taken by the MGM Summit 2016 (click photo to be taken to their website)

Interesting presentations by seasoned industry leaders, with an agenda aimed at growing the research base, informing, and supporting the work we all do on site at events. Presentations included medical directors and logisticians from the Super Bowl, Rio Olympics 2016, Electric Daisy Carnival, Burning Man and a ton of others! Really amazing to share ideas with so many people that are as personally invested and qualified in MG safety, and have been bitten equally hard by the event bug.

Personal highlights:

Shaking our heads in envy at the $15 million Super Bowl budget

Laughing through Mick Molloy’s Irish music festival caper where 35 ambulances presented in 6 hours to a community hospital, 8 of them stabbed by a single altered attendee and many of the remaining patients trying to have MDMA-fueled relations with each other despite the chaos in an overwhelmed and understaffed ED

Feeling more comfortable with the Shambhala challenges after learning how Electric Daisy Carnival’s 140,000 attendees are managed — a full order of magnitude more insanity!

Sheila Turris and Adam Lund got a chance to present the state of the MGMIG’s current work as part of the coordination of an event “Chain of Survival” concept. This framework has grown with their hard work, and is moving into a more solid operationalized form that is now identifying the research questions needing answers with respect to providing on site safety systems at music festivals. The next steps will be to get some answers to those questions! Stacey Lock and I also presented the Shambhala Harm Reduction and Medical Collaboration experience as part of a panel highlighting the importance of preparation and safety planning to decrease the risks and impact at music festivals. It was a great experience and was well received.

Overall this meeting underlined the potential for the mass gathering research network to grow internationally, hopefully improving our collaborations and making use of many providers’ battle-tested on site experiences. Looking forward to next year!